


Human Memory

by platoapproved



Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Angst, Fix-It, Fluff, M/M, Sentimental nonsense, Slash, Wish Fulfillment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-12
Updated: 2010-05-12
Packaged: 2017-11-08 09:42:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/441841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/platoapproved/pseuds/platoapproved
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jamie never really forgets the Doctor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Human Memory

**Author's Note:**

> Written just after I finished 'The War Games'. I wanted to add a little coda to act as a bridge linking the end of that series with 6B.

The Time Lord scientists do not understand human memory. Of course, tests have been run. They possess ample statistics — equations and charts of great sophistication. Yet they have become too cerebral, too indolent in their theory. How long has it been since the technology has been put to use? What call has Gallifrey for such an obscure branch of science?  
  
In a way it is not their fault. At the time of James McCrimmon’s erasure, all the relevant data had not been brought to their attention.  
  
-  
  
Jamie, crouching in the gorse and wiping the redcoat’s red blood onto his socks, feels foreign in his own body. There is a scar on his leg he doesn’t remember, a bullet wound months-long healed. Without explanation hair is in his eyes; under the blood, his fingernails are uniformly cut. He pushes it aside, listening for the sound of horse’s hooves, for the crack of muskets. He must survive. He must survive not just for himself, but for someone. He runs quickly. Dozens of unremembered prisons and perils and last-minute plans are embedded in his body’s mute electrical impulses  
  
Somewhere in him, head or heart or hippocampus, there is an empty outline of a man he cannot know. It is not his dead father, and it is not his laird, and it is not Prince Charlie, and it is not God.  
  
He cannot focus. To those he meets he looks like a man trying to listen to music that no one else can hear. War does strange things to boys like him. The women feed him and hide him in their cellars when the soldiers come knocking. Soon enough, Jamie is on a ship to America like so many of the others. The smell of the sea and its dark green weeds makes him sad, makes him think incongruously of soft small hands, precious and terrified. Jamie has found many more scars on his body that he does not remember.  
  
He eats the rotten meat and becomes feverish, sweats and raves, calling for the Doctor. He is lucky. This boat has a medical man on board. The people bending over him say, “We have brought the doctor,” but the hands which clamp his clammy forehead are incorrect.  
  
\--  
  
Time Lords have recorded evidence of the human mind’s ability to be emotionally conditioned. Earth studies on it, conducted by those pretentious primitive neuroscientists with their silly little names, were filed away with the rest. Possessed, categorized, but unconsulted. (The Doctor dug one up when he was in the Academy. He had always liked putting his hands where they weren’t supposed to go.)  
  
There was a patient, a human man, whose long-term memory had been damaged so that he could not form new memories. Tragic condition, surprisingly common. This man — James, for instance — was visited once a day by a doctor. Every day this doctor was a stranger to him. They told jokes and life stories, played board games, ate together. This doctor was gentle and friendly and affirming, without a single day’s deviation. After a few weeks, James began to recognize the doctor. Not cognitively, not experientially, but emotionally. He opened the door each day with a brighter smile of surprise. In interviews James said he had never before experienced such an instant connection. How odd, he observed, to see a man I had never met and feel joy, and safety.  
  
Inside his skull his injured brain kept impressions only as long as dune sand, yet he looked at an unremembered face and felt warm.  
  
\---  
  
In the fields of South Carolina Jamie is bent low, a bead of sweat running down the tip of his nose. It is near sunset and the rest of the indentured Jacobite servants have been allowed to quit. He never could learn to keep his mouth shut, and works on in punishment.  
  
A shout rings from the top of the ridge and Jamie stands up to see, shading his eyes with his hand. A man is running along the furrows in the soil, down the hill in his direction. He is a funny figure, short in a too-large coat, stumbling over the clods, clapping his hands together in delight. Jamie can barely make out the things he is saying, absurd phrases like “found you at last” and “I talked the Time Lords round, so long as we do a couple of little favours” and “really, Jamie, you should hear the things they’re saying about you up at the house, this is worse than that time on Io!”  
  
Jamie knows he should laugh, or run away from the madman, but he is too busy fighting down the stupid urge to cry. When the man reaches Jamie he stops, rocking back and forth on his feet, avoiding eye contact.  
  
“I see, yes, yes of course you don’t remember me, do you?” His hand, halfway to Jamie’s shoulder, drops like a stone.  
  
Jamie McCrimmon has never let his brain get in the way of his actions. He sees the Doctor and feels that he is right, every atom. His voice is correct, the cadence and heft of his words, the accent. Every hair is in the ideal place, every wrinkle in his clothes and skin aligned perfectly with some innately-known design. He takes the man’s face in his hands and kisses him, breathlessly, confusedly. Before a heartbeat has passed the man is kissing him back, without hesitation. Jamie is laughing as he draws away to ask:  
  
“And who the hell’re you?”


End file.
